get asa 2014 events into your calendar more easily
I got sick of navigating the ASA Meeting Calendar thing, so I threw together something some of you might find useful. You can see what’s happening on various days, but also—and this is the potentially useful part—every event has an associated .ics file for you to download and import into your preferred calendar application such as iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, and so on. Dates, times, summary information, and locations included. Enjoy.
orgtheory.net 
Kieran, nice public service! For years, I’ve been struck by the (once) huge gap between the functionality of the AoM annual meeting site & the ASA site. ASA has caught up somewhat, but we could ask for more. Why not bug the ASA to build this into future meeting sites? Why should the public have to do this?
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Howard Aldrich
July 27, 2014 at 3:32 pm
Kieran— you the real mvp.
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gradstudent
July 27, 2014 at 7:53 pm
Thanks for your efforts, Kieran. Testing on Android & Google calendar, it looks like it scraped the times as UTC so, for example, something beginning at 8am PDT is showing in my calendar as 8am UTC and 3am CDT (–> 1am PDT). The time zone on the item can be edited to bring it into the correct time. But you do need to fix the time zone or your Google calendar anyway will get you there at the wrong time as it is time zone sensitive.
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olderwoman
July 27, 2014 at 10:56 pm
Thank you.
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fabiorojas
July 27, 2014 at 11:29 pm
Hm. The first time the site went live late last night the calendar events had no timezone information. However, this morning I added timezone information to every event. All calendar events are specified as taking place in PST, and the .ics files contain the relevant encoding for letting your calendar know that. Importing events into the applications I have access to shows the right behavior—e.g. an 8:30am PST event shows up at 11:30am in my currently east-coast/Eastern time calendar, but when I tell my computer I’m in California (or look at the event details) it shows up at 8:30am. My Google calendar also shows the correct behavior. Did you download these events late last night or very early this morning by any chance? If so, please download the bad appointment file again and see if it works.
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Kieran
July 27, 2014 at 11:32 pm
The problem appears to be in how my phone processes the input. Time zone was correct when I tested downloading one of the items as a calendar file to my desktop and then importing into Google calendar. The item also entered Outlook correctly.
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olderwoman
July 28, 2014 at 12:51 am
I had the same problem as olderwoman this morning (not early) when I tried importing on my Mac (moving everything seven hours earlier). Still seems to happen with the updated version now.
But no worries, easy enough to move the things I’m interested in. Thanks for doing this.
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cwalken
July 28, 2014 at 3:35 am
OK, thanks for the feedback. I think I’ve found and fixed the problem. The start and end time markers had both the timezone specification prefix and the “Z” suffix specifying UTC. In effect that’s combining two of the three .ics standards for staying what time it is. You can have a date/time with no UTC or timezone tag; a UTC date/time with no timezone info, or a date/time tag with timezone info but no UTC tag. If you give a calendar app start/end times that have both time zone and UTC tag, some will choose to pay attention to the timezone, some will privilege UTC, and others will get confused.
In any event I’ve fixed this, and hopefully the .ics events should now behave properly for everyone. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know either way, if you get a chance.
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Kieran
July 28, 2014 at 10:25 am
Looks like that solved the problem on my phone. Thanks, Kieran.
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olderwoman
July 28, 2014 at 1:25 pm
Great! I think everything’s working as it should now. Thanks again for the feedback.
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Kieran
July 28, 2014 at 2:29 pm
Update: Jamie Arca at ASA responded to the email I sent Friday. As of today, the option exists on the ASA “my schedule” page to download your previously-created personal schedule as one file with all the events in it. So now you have multiple options. If, like me, you’d already created a schedule, you can use the ASA link. Or, Kieran’s, for an event-by-event selection. Kudos to ASA.
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olderwoman
July 28, 2014 at 4:45 pm
[…] signs that the ASA does, in fact, (sometimes) listen to its members. First, the ASA responded to efforts to more easily export the annual meeting schedule by providing that option within the online system. Now, it is seeking feedback on the ASA […]
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ASA is trying to listen | Memoirs of a SLACer
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